“Amazingly, the richest 1% of American households now has a higher net worth than the bottom 90%. The annual income of the richest 12,000 households is greater than that of the poorest 24m households.”

After the Flood by Margaret Atwood. The second volume of her Maddaddam Trilogy, another “biopunk” novel which explores social breakdown and the post-human.

The City & the City by China Mieville. An odd novel which stretches the limits of genre by combining elements of noir, the fables of Borges and speculative fiction. Tremendously intelligent.

Detective Story by Imre Kertesz. This bleak novella could be a parable about the Dirty Wars in South America during the 1970s.

Minaret by Leila Aboulelah. I’ll be teaching this in the Spring. As with her first novel, The Translator, Aboulelah very deftly asserts her emotional perceptiveness. The story of a once-privileged Sudanese woman now working as a maid in London.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. A scifi novel that has assumed classic status for many aficionados of the genre. The parallels with out current political predicament are unavoidable.

Omega Point by Don Delillo. An understated, very short novel which nonetheless possesses considerable depth and incorporates an art installation titled “24 hour Psycho”, an unmade documentary and a disappearance in the desert. Not sure what to make of it.

Non-fiction:

Exterminate All the Brutes! by Sven Lindqvist. A travel memoir, literary criticism, and a mediation on the colonial origins of the European genocide.

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. Zizek called it “compulsively readable” and I tend to agree. A very short volume which confronts the question of imagining an alternative to the neoliberal present.

Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction by Robert J.C. Young. A brief account of the political stakes and critical methods of postcolonialism. Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series is a great way to get up to speed on a range of issues and disciplines.

Culture and the Real by Catherine Belsey. She’s one of my favorite cultural critics. This text picks up the theoretical work of Lacan and others to assess the status of culture in the contemporary.

The Condor Years by John Dinges. In the 1970s several Latin American dictatorships cobbled together an intelligence apparatus for state terror (“counter-subversion) which attempted to destroy leftist social movements.

Is it possible that truth is always retrospective? That truth– a truth, The truth– is only accessible after the fact? We live in a culture of immediacy– one perpetually suspended in contemporaneity– a state of overstimulated amnesia, according to some, in which we are incapable of imagining any future except as another version of the present. Thus odds are most of us would more readily recognize a photo of Justin Bieber than, say, this fellow right here: